#104 Summer Memories
September 25, 2008
Our home places are treasures that are beyond value. A visit to the Rambler’s summertime home of youth reinforces the bittersweet richness of these special landscapes.
This show originally aired in September 25, 2008 on “The Rivanna Rambler,” a weekly public affairs show airing every Thursday at 11:55 a.m. on WTJU 91.1 FM or wtju.net
I recently spent a few days on Cape Cod, that sandy fist off the coast of Massachusetts — prime vacation destination and historic homeport to whalers and fishermen and native Americans even earlier. On the morning of my departure, I took one last dip in the buoyant salt water of Nantucket Sound and emerged wet and dripping in the early autumn cool, glad for my native New England blood.
Where I stood, the beach is short and tucked in between stone jetties that flank two harbors – Wychmere and Saquetucket. The beach extends back several hundred yards, rising up a slight bluff to the house, just barely beyond the reach of the hurricane storm surge. The beach grass is studded with sprawling clumps rosa rugosa, the beach rose, whose fleshy fruits produce the rose hips for jelly and medicines. I used to think it was native, but now know it is actually an introduced species – and on this beach, now being overtaken by another non-native, the oriental bittersweet, whose bowers obscure the fold of the bluff itself.
Just across the channel beyond the Wychmere Harbor jetty is the beach where I learned the ways of water. Every summer, our family rented a house for several weeks down the road from the bluff. Those summer days consisted of walking everywhere: to the one-room library open only on Tuesday and Friday afternoons, but full of alluring Nancy Drew and Black Stallion classics. Or down to the harbor with one fat orange life preserver dangled over my shoulders and a set of oars under the other, to a modest plywood dinghy named “Cheer-up” that I would row, rain or shine, through calm or gusty winds, across the harbor to the yacht club where I learned how to sail in an equally modest plywood catboat called “Dragonfly.” Sometimes, we’d walked across the street from our house to one of the two clay tennis courts owned by neighboring families, where I would try to emulate the strong and graceful strokes of the adults.
And, of course, we walked to the beach. Down the end of Bay View lane, a dark tunnel between two tall fences overhung with privet in musky bloom, the path a cool mix of sand and loam, pine needles crunching under bare feet. And there was a light at the end of this tunnel, for there, at the top of the stairs to the beach, was the view of the water, to the barrier islands and, if the tide was right, a squat clump of land we knew to be Nantucket. At this beach, I learned to swim and to float. I learned the sharp bite of crabs on my toes, I learned of phosphorescence at night and by day to dive into crashing storm waves, to love the feel of coarse sand against skin reddened by sun, knowing a shower awaited back at the house. By any account, it was a privileged childhood, whose riches have only become more apparent as I have aged.
Like most landscapes, this these beaches and bluffs have changed with time. The Harbor called Saquetucket used to be a fresh water creek, whose sinuous curves we floated, on the outgoing tide through the peaty bog pockmarked with the holes of fiddler crabs. My nose remembers the rank marsh smell even though boats traverse its channel, now dredged straight and deep. The real estate that was once a shabby summer inn on the beach has now sprouted three gigantic condominiums, whose scale so dwarfs the shoreline that they have become a navigation aid from far at sea.
For all of us, September is a time of transition – the most recent summer has passed and its memories merge with all summers past. It’s not only the plants that are bittersweet, I realized, picking up a shiny orange jingle shell, one of many brought ashore by each tide. Taking in the goldenrod blooming full again beach grass in the light of this one morning, I stood on a slight rise where a fore-dune has been forming over the last twenty years. I realized that if I ever returned to this spot, it will look different for every reason that marks time and that the only thing I can take with me is the memory of cool sand between my toes, the colors of this morning, and the sure knowledge that I love this place as I have loved no other.